Financial Manager's Role

In a management atmosphere characterized by a multitude of complicated financial challenges, today's chief financial officers (CFOs) must perform many vital roles. They effectively add real value to their company by supplying reliable strategic leadership, a reliable financial perspective, and involved contribution to critical executive choices. Financial managers must look at long term strategies and forgo any short term quick strategies that do not represent the long term good of the company.

The significance of the CFO's role in financial planning cannot be overstated. A reliable financial plan, authored by the CEO and CFO, supplies the backbone for a business, connecting the business's strategic mission and vision to quantifiable financial goals. An acute financial plan helps the business establish the critical association between strategy and financial capacity and achieve operating results that guarantee fiscal equilibrium. Compared to a stockholder, a financial manager has a different time element to consider. The stockholder wants a quick return and to increase the stock price quickly then sell and move on to the next stock, while a financial manager must keep her eyes of the long term goals of the company.

The CEO is accountable for establishing a "vision" for strategic capital investment that sets out what the business wishes to achieve given its mission, but the actual procedure of apportioning that capital should be the territory of the CFO. The most significant financial choice made each year by the senior executive team and confirmed by the board is how much cash to spend and on which programs the dollars will be spent. Investing in the "right projects" falls to the financial manager, choosing between projects, the financial manager needs to consider not only speed of payback but amount of risk involved.

Finance in the world following Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco means that the CFO is first and foremost the chief accounting officer. Financial leaders must act on the fact that businesses credibility depends on the accuracy of financial statements. Although major audit firms have tightened standards, significant accounting choice points remain for the CFO, including recognition of loss on investments, pension accounting, accounting for acquisitions and divestitures, and accounting for derivative